The true name of evil

Acentury ago, during World War I, the Ottoman Empire killed 1.5 million Armenians in a bloodbath whose historic proportions stand in marked contrast to how little recognized that horror has been. On Sunday, during a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Francis firmly righted the scales by describing the death spree as the “first genocide of the 20th century.”

“Concealing or denying evil is like allowing a wound to keep bleeding without bandaging it,” the pontiff said, touching off fury in the modern Republic of Turkey, where the government has long insisted that its forebears engaged not in genocide but in hard-fought combat.

The record says otherwise. Long before Polish-Jewish World War II refugee Raphael Lemkin coined the word “genocide” in 1944, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau cabled the State Department in 1915 that the Ottomans were engaged in a “campaign of race extermination.”

Morgenthau, grandfather of longtime Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, later wrote:

“When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact.”

In 2001, Pope John Paul II used the word genocide to describe the Armenian massacre that began 100 years ago next week. Now, as he decries present day massacres of Christians, Francis used his singularly unafraid moral voice to tell it like it was. And thank goodness he did.